


Sunset Softness

by Winterling42



Series: Flesh and Blood and Dust [47]
Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, F/M, First Kiss, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-27
Updated: 2018-05-27
Packaged: 2019-05-14 07:28:21
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,789
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14765228
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Winterling42/pseuds/Winterling42
Summary: Softness in the Wasteland is a weakness. But sometimes, weakness is how you stay human. Furiosa and Max bot need help remembering softness.





	Sunset Softness

He was out on the terraces, away from the cold stink of the Citadel. Epharia was nowhere to be seen, and Max was pretending not to worry. His daemon was as skittish as he was, staying here, and if she wanted to find some way to relieve that skittering fear he wouldn’t ask her to stay. It was against their personality, anyway, to need comfort other than the angry sun and the hot blue of the sky. They’d torn apart and found each other again, months he did not like to remember, full of loss and pain and _loneliness_ of a kind he’d never experienced before. The pain hadn’t magically gone away, either, it had just gotten less important, until it became just another scar. And he had plenty of those.

Furiosa came out to sit beside him as the sun burned its way towards the horizon. When he’d looked over his shoulder to see who was coming, Max noted first that she wasn’t wearing her prosthetic. Then that she was looking for him, then that she was shaking her head as he started to stand. She still wore the yellowed whites of her days as Joe’s Imperator, still walked like every step was an inch away from violence. And he’d been here for long enough (thirty-two days, although he pretended not to count) that just from the time he heard her steps on the sandy rock to the moment she lowered herself to the ground next to him, he knew that something was wrong.

He also knew that asking her about it would end with him shaking stars out of his eyes and Furiosa stalking off. It was a defense mechanism, developed around half-life greedy War Boys, when being off your step meant losing your life. Max might not have been around enough people to have developed the same fear of questions, but he understood fear well enough. He understood _her_ well enough, though he tried not to dwell on that. 

Epharia would come back tonight and remind him that they’d be leaving soon. That they always left. And he didn’t need her to remind him, but Furiosa was sitting close enough for their shoulders to brush, and he didn’t miss the fact that she’d chosen to sit with her shortened arm closest to him. 

Something was wrong, and he couldn’t ask her about it, so Max continued to turn the turbine engine over in his hands, trying to puzzle out the dog-sized machine before taking it apart. The windmills up in the gardens were the source of power that pumped up water from beneath the Citadel, and Max was under no illusions of what would happen if that power failed. Neither, to his surprise, were the Sisters, that those down below called the Queens. 

“The Dag and Cheedo have been talking,” Furiosa said at last. Max hummed an acknowledgement and ran a thumb over thick-toothed gears, making certain they were spinning smoothly. “About... things.”

Max did glance up at her now, only to find Furiosa looking resolutely out over the edge, towards the garage tower. He’d never heard her hesitate to talk about something before; she _refused_ to talk about a lot of things, would go silent and tense if she was feeling restrained, and would punch the shit out of things if she wasn’t. But she didn’t _hesitate_. 

The Sisters had also been nagging him about using more words. The Dag had come at him with a speech just last night about how much power words had, to help and to hurt, and that using them would encourage old wounds to scar over. She’d been very passionate about it. Max refused to check himself for little finger-tip sized bruises from all the times she’d poked his chest to emphasize her point. So instead of an encouraging grunt (which would have done the job just as well, Max was certain) he set down the engine and said, “What. Sort of things?”

Furiosa drew in a deep breath. She wrapped both arms around herself and ground her teeth and refused to look at him. “Things like love,” she said, and her voice was hard, brittleness creeping in around the edges. “Things like... waking up slowly. Like knowing you’re not going to die today. And not wanting to.”

Max blinked, and nodded, and wanted very badly to hold her hand. Well. He _wanted_ to wrap her up and press his forehead against hers and run his hand through the lengthening bristle of her hair and watch her eyes to see every shade of green they turned when the light hit them. But he knew how well _that_ would be received. So he would settle for holding her hand. 

“And I–” Furiosa snapped her teeth shut, exactly like Epharia when she was nervous. Max felt his heart break a little more, and tried to pretend that he wasn’t falling apart at the joins. That he could be here, a hundred days from now, two hundred days from now. That he could live without leaving. 

“I was wondering if you knew what a kiss was.” She said it all at once, hammering out each word like a recalcitrant piece of scrap, and Max felt his mind go blank and his heart flare out in a burst of emotion that even he couldn’t decipher. There was fear in there, and anger, but most of it was...

He tried to twist his expression into something not quite so sappy as the smile that tried to curl up the edges of his face. By the way Furiosa was staring at him like he was an alien, Max wasn’t sure it worked. Finally he managed to grunt an agreement. And then, because it was Furiosa, he cleared his throat. “Yeah,” he said, and was suddenly sure the heat on his face had very little to do with the sun. “Yeah. A long time ago, I...” He stopped. “It’s been a long time.” 

Furiosa smiled, a small, grim smile that looked like old pain. “For me too,” she said, and neither of them wanted to elaborate. Wanted to remember the last time they had been safe enough to love. To want to kiss someone. 

“Did you...” Max wasn’t sure if he wanted an answer to this question either, but he cleared his throat to ask it anyway. “Why mention it?”

Furiosa looked, and looked, and looked, and she stayed quiet and it did all sorts of things to the places in his chest that he’d thought long dead and buried in dust. He was the one who glanced away, who looked down and back, his heart beating out of sync and wondering what the hell they were doing. This was the Wasteland. Hope was a mistake, and love was a death sentence. 

“Only if you’d want to,” she said, and Max knew-without-knowing all the thousands of days worth of pain that fit into those words. His feral head kept flicking his eyes from place to place; the green, the engine he was working on, the empty space past the edge of the tower, the dusty rock under their feet. But his heartbeat got slower, settling into place like it’d known where this was going all along, like his heart already beat for the furious warrior sitting in front of him, her own face full of fear but her eyes steady. 

Max looked back, at last, and he smiled without meaning to, the kind of open grin he hadn’t used for a thousand days or more. “Yeah,” he muttered, awkward as a teenager again and blushing with it. “I’d like…yeah.” 

Furiosa bit her lip to hide her smile, and under the clean desert dust she was blushing too. And she leaned forward, but she waited for him to meet her in between. Where both their eyes were open, where both of them knew the risk they were taking and they took it anyway.

At first she was all teeth and bone, not angry but awkward, biting at his upper lip like she wanted to taste blood. Max reached up to run his thumb across her cheekbone, to slow her, calm her, and Furiosa flinched away. It was a small flinch, and she would not have acknowledged it if he hadn’t drawn back an inch or two, pressed his forehead against hers like they’d done when he’d first come back. 

“Sorry,” he said, and he wrapped her human hand in his instead, felt his whole body pulled towards her like she was the whole world and he was a moon trapped in orbit. And she would have refused his apology, he saw the recrimination in her eyes and found he could not stand it. That blame was not hers to carry. 

So he kissed her again, just barely pressed his lips against her growing scowl and felt it melt away. He kissed her as gently as he could remember how, and knew it was clumsy, kissed the corners of her mouth and shivered when she hummed against his lips. Furiosa was danger, was death itself with a rifle in her hands, but she was this too. Afraid, leaning forward anyway, her shortened arm pressed against his tricep and her whole hand holding onto his. 

They broke apart again, and she leaned her forehead against his, and her eyes were the dark green of the trees in the old skull room, glittering with sunlight and shade. Max forced his lungs to remember how to breathe, feeling as settled and whole as the stone of the Citadel itself. If nothing ever changed, if this moment went on forever, he thought he could live like this just fine. 

“That, was…” Furiosa sighed instead of finishing her sentence. Max hummed an agreement, letting his eyes slide shut. Despite everything he knew and everything that this place was, he felt safe here. Now. Like this, sitting in the sun with his lips tingling and his chest full of fire. 

“Good,” he said, and he meant more than one thing. It was, despite (or perhaps because of) their mutual inexperience, a good kiss. More than that, though, _good_ was a rare thing in the Wasteland. As rare as water. And since the Citadel had such an abundance of the latter, Max thought it was a particular brand of justice that they should be making it into a place full of the former as well. 

“Maybe I’ll ask again. Sometimes.” Furiosa was watching him with an expression so open and vulnerable it made him ache just to see it. When was the last time someone had trusted him like this? When was the last time he had allowed himself to trust?

“I’d like that.” 


End file.
